The Allusive Method

A critical essay in the Criticism & Craft series.

1. The problem of inherited language

Allusion has an old reputation problem. A reader who meets a borrowed line can feel flattered, excluded, or tricked. The flattered reader enjoys recognizing the source. The excluded reader suspects a private joke. The tricked reader suspects that the borrowing hides a thin scene behind a famous name.

Any serious account of an allusive writer has to answer that suspicion. The question is not how many sources the work contains. It is what the work does with them, and what remains when a reader cannot name them. A method that survives that test deserves to be called a method. A method that fails it is ornament.

2. Four modes

The author’s concordance, “The Allusive Mulhern,” organizes the practice into four modes. The first is the named source, where the text says whom it is borrowing from. The second is the structural echo, where a whole scene, plan, or arc follows an earlier one. The third is the allusive name, where a character’s or place’s name carries another text with it. The fourth is the doubled word or pun, where one word works in two registers at once.

The four modes differ in how much a reader must know. The named source asks almost nothing, because the text hands over the reference. The structural echo and the allusive name ask more, because the reader must notice a pattern or a name. The pun asks for attention to the sentence itself.

This ranking by demand matters for what follows. A writer who relies only on the fourth mode can be read well by anyone. A writer who relies only on the second makes a reader without the source feel shut out. The work under discussion spreads its weight across all four.

3. Three effects

Re-addressing

The simplest transformation is a change of pronoun. In “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” a line from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” becomes “they contain multitudes.” The “I” that claimed the multitude in the poem becomes a “they” assigned to a classroom of teenagers. The grammar alone moves the claim from self-description to address. The same shift happens with Emerson (“your” becomes “their”), with Dickinson (“I dwell” becomes “We dwell in possibilities”), and with a letter of Dickinson’s (“my” becomes “your”).

These shifts are small, and they show on the page. A reader can see them without knowing the source at all, because the sentence already speaks to a room. That is why re-addressing supports the claim of this essay: the borrowed line does work in its new scene before anyone recognizes it.

Recurrence

The second effect is repetition across the body of work. A name, an image, or a structure returns in a new setting. Recurrence is not the same as allusion, but it gives allusion a second job. When a reader meets an echo, the question is not only “where is this from?” but “where has this appeared before in this author’s work?”

Recurrence also guards against a quiet failure of allusion, the one-off trick. A single borrowed line can be a flourish. A borrowed line that returns, transformed, is a habit of mind. The concordance exists to make that habit visible by gathering the instances in one place.

Hedged sacredness

The third effect is religious register, and it needs care. The vocabulary of the sacred runs through the work: saints, communion, the Holy Spirit, assumption. But the text keeps hedging. In “Teaching at Fifty-Six,” the Holy Spirit appears with a question mark, and the narrator withholds his opinion from a student who doubts the story of Jonah. The sacred register comes from concrete scenes, not from doctrine.

So the work should not be called devout, and it should not be called skeptical. Its stance is closer to attention: it treats ordinary moments as worth the vocabulary of the holy, and it declines to rank that vocabulary above others.

4. First case: “Assumptions”

The story “Assumptions” has a dense religious structure. Its epigraph from the Song of Solomon (4:7) corresponds to the Marian antiphon Tota Pulchra Es, and the story enacts the dogma of the Assumption on its central character, Peggy Fleming. This is a structural echo of the second kind: the story’s arc follows the feast’s arc, so a reader who knows the feast sees the pattern, while a reader who doesn’t still follows a story about a woman, her family, and her death.

That is the proportion the method promises. The source is audible to those who can hear it and invisible to those who cannot, and the scene stands in both cases. The religious frame adds a second reading and does not replace the first.

The case also shows a limit. A structural echo can be overread, because any story about death and ascent can be matched to the Assumption. The responsible reading therefore rests on the text’s own markers, here the epigraph, and on the author’s published commentary, not on resemblance alone.

5. Second case: “Teaching at Fifty-Six”

The essay “Teaching at Fifty-Six” opens by naming its debts: “Inspired by the words of Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Dickinson, and other patron saints of American literature.” That is a named source, offered at once. It then sets lifted sentences beside student replies: “This ain’t math, Mr.,” “Mr. Mulhern be on crack,” and “That’s so gay.” The gap between the registers is the essay’s engine.

The unnamed borrowings are quieter. “But always, hope eternal” compresses a line of Pope and reads as an idiom. The ladder “hanging close to the side of the schooner” borrows an image from Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” and the essay changes the diver’s solitary descent into a collective, resisted climb, answered by a student’s “Mr., I ain’t getting wet for nobody.” A line about running fast and stretching arms farther echoes Fitzgerald, except that the essay faces a past that keeps arriving, in former students who are now in their thirties.

The Eliot borrowings are the clearest reversal. “Students come and go” and “how they would fix you in some formulated phrase” come from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock cannot ask his question. The narrator asks it: “What did they see when they looked at me?” The source supplies the fear and the scene supplies the answer, and neither cancels the other.

6. What the evidence supports

The evidence supports four claims. First, the work uses all four modes, not one. Second, its most visible transformations (pronoun shifts, reversals, collectivizing) can be seen on the page without the source. Third, its sacred vocabulary is hedged and rooted in concrete scenes. Fourth, the author documents his borrowings openly, in notes and in the concordance.

The evidence does not support the claim that every resemblance is deliberate. The wording proves presence, not intention. Where the author’s own commentary says a borrowing is intended, the claim stands on that commentary. Where it does not, the claim should be held lightly, and the notes themselves call some borrowings echoes, which signals that hold.

7. Objections

The objection from exclusion. A reader without the sources is shut out. The reply is partial. The scenes work without the sources, so the reader is not shut out of the story. But the reader may be shut out of a second layer of meaning, and the concordance is the author’s answer: it publishes the layer so the reader can enter it.

The objection from ornament. A borrowed line is a costume. The reply is that the costume is changed. A pronoun shift, a reversal, or a collectivizing turn means the line is doing new work, and decoration does not rework what it borrows.

The objection from authority. Heavy reliance on famous sources borrows their prestige. The reply is that the sources are set beside ordinary speech and are not placed above it. The student’s refusal to get wet sits next to Rich’s diver without being corrected by it.

8. A note on method

The most useful discipline for reading this work is to keep three questions separate. What is on the page? What does the author’s commentary say about it? What does the reader’s knowledge add? Mixing them produces overreading, and keeping them apart makes each claim checkable.

The same discipline applies to this essay. Its claims about the concordance, the story, and the teaching essay should be tested against the published texts, and a claim that fails the test should be dropped.

9. What the reading shows

Mulhern’s allusive method works by proportion. It borrows openly, changes what it borrows, lets the ordinary scene stand beside the inherited line, and hedges its sacred vocabulary. The concordance, the story, and the teaching essay all support that description, and none supports more than that. The larger claims, about the poetry and the rest of the fiction, are open questions for separate readings.

Works Cited

All Essays The Allusive Mulhern (Concordance) Allusion without Displacement →